zlacker

>>levlaz+(OP)
On the one side: Yes, truer words have never been spoken. You want a new feature added? Want to talk about how the project should change directions? Want to impose new rules? Do a little power play? Yeah, start working on the project, implementing changes/features you want to see.

On the other side: No. When you provide software that is widely used and that people rely on, you automatically created a community where fixing bugs is an obligation. Your software has become a corner stone in other people’s software stack/life and so those people and their issues with your software have become your problem, too. If you want it or not.

Hiding behind open source and not fixing bugs has become a deal breaker so many times over the last few decades, that I stopped counting. Not everybody knows the language needed to fix a bug and not everybody understands the dependencies within a project to being able to fix a bug. So “fixing” one bug can create ten new ones and make things much worse.

Not to mention what happens when you attempt to fix the bug but the source is not accepted upstream because it’s bad, which is understandable, but still leaves you with an upstream version of the software and your patched version that fixes said bug.

>>Grimet+ad
Well, never use a dependency that you couldn't write or maintain yourself. It's really quite simple. As soon as you use a dependency, you take ownership of that code within your project. If you need changes made that the dependency owner isn't willing to do then fork the dependency. If you can't do that, don't use that dependency.

The actual advantage of open source is that you actually have access to the code, create a fork and maintain it yourself if things go south.

>>flohof+je
> Well, never use a dependency that you couldn't write or maintain yourself.

I must ask, do you use Linux?

(Linus, notably: can be hard on maintainers, very respectful of userspace)

>>msteff+mK1
I kinda feel like this is a bit of a bad-faith proto-argument.

The chances of the Linux kernel suddenly becoming completely unmaintained are so close to nil that it's not really worth considering.

But yes, if you're running something on top of Linux, and run into a kernel bug, you're of course free to report it, but the only guarantee is if you find and fix the bug yourself. None of those kernel developers are obligated to help you. In practice, many will want to help you! But that's not something anyone is entitled to.

I've worked at shops where there were people (myself included) who were capable of and occasionally had to dive into the kernel to fix issues. Often these were kernels coming from BSPs from some random chipset manufacturer, where the kernel was a year out of date and no Linux developer would want to touch it anyway. But even if we were running the absolute latest kernel version, we'd still probably dive in to investigate while reporting the issue upstream.